Last month, New York proposed a law to ban microbeads from all beauty products.

The tiny plastic particles, found in many scrubs and exfoliating beauty products, have been getting a bad rap over the last few years, and justifiably so. Little attention is paid to these grains that are rinsed down the drain, landing up in lakes, seas and oceans, leading to a "plastic soup".

Dutch NGO the North Sea Foundation kicked off the awareness campaign in 2011. Another Dutch NGO, the Plastic Soup Foundation, joined the cause soon after and launched the Beat the Microbead campaign the year after.

The campaign gained sufficient traction over the year to convince corporate heavyweight Unilever to announce in December 2012 that all of its products worldwide would be plastic free by 2015. Other multinationals — L'Oréal, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson — followed suit.

In January 2014, the Plastic Soup Foundation introduced the Beat the Microbead app (iOS, Android, Windows) to help you check if a product you're using contains microbeads. The product registry on the app is not extensive enough yet, and it doesn't recognise many brands available in India. In the meantime you should check the ingredients list on your product for polyethylene.

If you want to boycott the beads, switch out your current scrub with one of these: